Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web has a must-listen podcast interview with Tim Bray  and Radia Perlman about the their thoughts on the past and future of the web. Both are engineers at Sun Microsystems.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I don't know much about Radia, other than that she has contributed much to the development of the Internet. Richard writes (in the transcript version of the interview) that Radia "invented the spanning tree algorithm and is also sometimes referred to as the 'Mother of the Internet'."

Tim, too, has contributed much to the Internet. He is the co-author of the XML spec, upon which the RSS, Atom, and RDF web feed formats are based on. Most weblog platforms rely on XML, as do most web-based services such as SOAP, WSDL, etc. (He also co-founded Open Text Corporation. The company sells full-text search software and had one of the first search engines on the Internet. Surprisingly, Open Text has no (visible) RSS feeds on their website, a point which I made a while back.)

If you have any interest in web feeds (or the Internet) at all, this is a must-listen interview. The total length is about 37 minutes (Richard indicates that the podcast is 17 Mb, but I couldn't find a link to download it.)

About 24-25 minutes into the podcast interview, Tim talks about some of the flaws of the RSS format and the difference that the Atom file format and publishing protocol will make. He also makes a reference to Google's GData format, which is based on the Atom protocol and format.

Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/.